The guns fell silent again and remained silent while the naked toddler stood up uncertainly.
He began to wail again, standing solidly at last on the fat dimpled legs, a string of blue beads around the tightly bulging belly and his penis sticking out like a tiny brown finger.
From the mouth of the wadi emerged a running horse, a rawboned and rangy white stallion galloping heavily over the sandy ground with a frail boyish figure lying low along its neck, a black sham ma flying out wildly behind. The rider drove the stallion on towards where the child stood weeping, and had almost covered the open ground before the gunners realized what was happening.
The first machine gun traversed on the galloping animal, but this lead-off was stiff and the bullets kicked dust slightly high and behind. Then the horse reached the child and the rider reined in sharply, sending it rearing on its hind quarters, and the rider swung down to make the pick-up.
At that moment, two other machine guns opened up on the stationary target.
Jake Barton realized that there was only one way To prevent a confrontation between the Italian force which had appeared so silently and menacingly at the wells and the undisciplined mob of warriors and camp followers of the Ras's entourage. there was no chance that he could make himself heard in the hubbub of anxiously raised voices and emotional outbursts of Amharic as the Ras tried to make his view heard above the attempts of fifty of his chieftains and captains to do exactly the same thing.
Jake needed an interpreter and he thrust his way towards Gregorius Maryam, grabbed him firmly by the arm and dragged him out of the cave.
It needed considerable force, for Gregorius was as intent as everybody else in having his views and suggestions aired.
Jake was surprised to find how light it was outside the caves, and that the night had passed so swiftly. Dawn was only minutes away, and the dry desert air was sweet and heady after the crowded cave with its smoking fires.
In the light of the camp fires and the pale sky, he saw the mob streaming away down the wadi towards the wells, as happily excited as the crowds at a fairground.
"Stop them, Greg," he shouted. "Come on, we've got to stop them," and the two of them ran forward.
"What is it, Jake?"
"We've got to stop them running into the Eyetie camp."
"Why?"
"If somebody starts shooting, there will be a massacre." BUt we are not at war, Jake. They can't shoot."
"Don't bet on it, buddy boy," grunted Jake grimly, and his alarm was contagious. Side by side, they caught up with the straggling rear of the column and elbowed and kicked their way through it.
"Back, you bastards," roared Jake. "Get back, all of you, and made the meaning clear with flying fists and feet.
With Gregorius beside him, Jake reached the narrow mouth of the wadi where it debauched into the saucer shaped valley of the wells. Like the wall of a dam the two of them linked arms and managed to hold the flood of humanity there for a minute or so, but the pressure from those straining forward from the rear threatened to sweep them away, while the mood changed from high-spirited "curiosity to angry resentment at this check upon their efforts to join the hundreds of their comrades who had already passed out of the wadi and were streaming out across the open valley.
At the moment when they were swept aside, the firing began out there upon the slopes of the valley and instantly the mob froze and their voices died away. There was no further forward movement, and Jake turned and scrambled up the steep side of the wadi for a better view out into the valley.
From there he watched the slaughter that turned the va ley into a charnel house. He watched with a sick fascination that changed slowly, as minute after minute the guns continued their clamour. He felt it become anger and outrage that outweighed all else, so that he was hardly aware of the slim cold hand that sought his, and he glanced down only for an instant at Vicky's golden head at his shoulder, before turning his entire concentration back to the dreadful tragedy being played out before them.
Vaguely he was aware that Vicky was sobbing beside him, and that she had gripped his hand so tightly that the nails were driven deep into his palm. Yet even in his dreadful anger, Jake was studying the ground and marking the Italian positions. On his other hand, Gregorius Maryam was praying softly, his smooth young face turned to a muddy grey with horror and the words of the prayer forced between tight lips like the last breaths of a dying man.
"Oh God," whispered Vicky in a tight, choked voice, as the mortar bombing began, dropping relentlessly into the depressions where the survivors huddled for shelter. "Oh God, Jake, what can we do?" But he did not answer and it went on and on. They were caught in the nightmare of it, powerless in the grip of this horror watching the mortars continue the hunt, until the woman with her two infants burst out into the open not three hundred yards ahead of them.
"Oh God, oh please Jesus," whispered Vicky. "Please don't let it happen. Please make it stop now." The guns hunted the woman and they watched her die, and the child rise to its feet and stand lost and bewildered beside the mother's corpse. The thud of galloping hooves sounded in the wadi below them and Gregorius swung around and cried, "Sara! No!" as the girl rode out, crouched low over the stallion's neck. She rode bare-backed, a tiny dark figure on the big white animal.
"Sara!" Gregorius cried again, and would have followed her, running out alone into that deadly plain, but Jake grabbed his arm and held him easily, though he struggled and cried out again in Amharic.
The girl rode on unscathed through the storm of fire, and Vicky's breathing stopped as she watched. It was impossible that Sara could reach the child and return. It was stupid, so stupid as to make her anger leap even higher and yet there was something so moving about that frail beautiful child riding out to her death, that it filled Vicky with a sense of her own inadequacy, a sense of great humility for even in this proud moment, she was aware that she was incapable of such sacrifice.
She watched the stallion rear, and the girl lean out to gather the small brown infant, saw the machine guns find their target at last, and the stallion whinnied and went down in a tangle of flailing hooves, pinning both the girl and the child, while the bullets continued to spurt dust and slap loudly against the still kicking body of the stallion.
Gregorius was still struggling and blab bering his horror, and Jake turned and struck him an open-handed blow across the face.
"Stop that!" Jake snarled, his own anger and outrage making him brutal. "Anybody who goes out there is going to get his arse shot off." The blow seemed to steady Gregorius.
"We have got to get her, Jake. Please, Jake. Let me fetch her."
"We'll do it my way," snapped Jake. His face seemed carved from hard brown stone, but his eyes were ferocious and his jaws clamped closed with his anger. Roughly he shoved Gregorius ahead of him down into the wadi, and he dragged Vicky after him. She tried to resist, leaning back against his strength, her head turned towards the plain, and her reluctant feet sliding in the loose earth.
"Jake, what are you doing?" she protested, but he ignored her.
"We'll mount the guns. It won't take long." He was planning through his rage, as he dragged them back along the wadi to where the cars were parked beyond the caves.
Vicky and Gregoflus were helpless in the ferocity of his grip, swept along by his strength and his anger.
"Vicky, you will drive for me. I'll serve the gun," he told her.
"Greg, you drive for Gareth." Jake's breathing was shallow and fast with his rage. "We can only man two cars, one we will use as a diversion you and Gareth swing south along the back of the ridge and that will keep them busy while Vicky and I pick up Sara and as many of the others as we can find alive." The two of them listened to him, and were swept forward with a fresh urgency. As they ran back along the wadi, a final brief storm of machine-gun fire and exploding mortar bomb preceded the deep aching silence which now fell over the desert.